Webize Everything Community Group

"The web is extended in two ways - by adding new bits of technology to the existing stuff, and by 'webizing' existing applications and systems. Webizing is really important, not only as a way of bootstrapping the web using large amount of legacy information, but because the existing systems have been researched and designed over the years and it is really important we do not lose the knowledge accrued during that process."
--Tim Berners-Lee
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Webize.html
This Group aims to webize as many existing systems and applications as possible, and is committed to producing 5 star linked data, in line with the original vision of the web.
This group will not publish specifications.

Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.

As Internet based applications evolve, a new array of specifications are being developed and deployed. The idea is that internet users will be able to develop new ‘semantic’, ‘internet aware’ functionality as easily or in a similar way to the use and evolution of HTML as the foundation for WWW.

An important aspect of these new specifications is the concept of using 5 Star Linked-Data. So what is it?

As part of the evolving WWW design issues “Architectural and philosophical points” documentation; Tim Berners-lee describes the concept of LinkedData. Critical to the design is the use of RDF.

TimBL Describes 5-Star Linked Data in the following way

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Available on the web (whatever format) but with an open licence, to be Open Data

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Available as machine-readable structured data (e.g. excel instead of image scan of a table)

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as (2) plus non-proprietary format (e.g. CSV instead of excel)

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All the above plus, Use open standards from W3C (RDF and SPARQL) to identify things, so that people can point at your stuff

★★★★★

All the above, plus: Link your data to other people’s data to provide context

SOURCE: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html

The 5 ★ Open Data site provides some good additional information to get started in understanding 5-star Linked Data.

The starting point for any application developer is perhaps to start understanding RDF. Useful resources can be found on the Linked-Data Github Repository and important related works include the Read Write Web, WebID, and a list of other related communities can be found here.